Road Roughness Crowd-Sensing with Smartphone Apps

This paper presents the outline of an integrated road roughness monitoring system and illustrates its proper functioning with data collected from a large community. The originality of the proposed crowd-sensing system is the extraction of relevant information from uncalibrated smartphones. By not imposing any stringent measurement protocol on users, partner apps of the project continuously provide a stream of roughness measures from daily travels. This ensures a large scale collection of data. Combined with mobility detection algorithms, the system monitors the degradation of roads from a multi-modal standpoint. Combined with traffic monitoring, this system offers a key tool to help decision makers in charge of public road networks.